Can you statically compile a cygwin application?

Question

Does cygwin allow a statically compiled binary? This would prevent the need for cygwin1.dll being on the PATH of target machines.

Answer 1

For Cygwin with mingw32 installed, your command line would be of the form

x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc.exe main.c -o main.exe

This bypasses the need for cygwin1.dll altogether.

Answer 2

Cygwin's GCC no longer supports -mno-cygwin.

Try to use mingw-gcc instead, e.g. x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc, as mentioned in the Cygwin FAQ.

Answer 3

Nope, it's currently not possible to statically link against cygwin1.dll; if your application does not use unix emulation (i.e. pure win32) you can pass -mno-cygwin to the compiler.

See also the FAQ:
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.programming.win32-no-cygwin
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.programming.static-linking